Stein: We want recounts because the polls said Hillary would win

Larry O'ConnorPosted at 10:01 am on November 29, 2016

In a revealing interview on The Alan Colmes Show Monday afternoon, failed Green Party candidate Jill Stein conceded (perhaps inadvertently) that the reason she’s calling for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania is, in part, because Hillary Clinton was expected to win those states.

Listen to the whole interview here, but I have pulled out the key statement: (emphasis mine)

The three states that we chose including Michigan that only just now declared its winner. This was not a partisan choice, this was zooming in on the states that have the markings of being most vulnerable to hacking because they had thin margins. They went the opposite way of what was expected and they had some kind of voting system vulnerability.

Hidden inside the baseless suggestion that the voting systems had been hacked (“some kind of voting system vulnerability”) was that key phrase “they went the opposite way of what was expected.”

Sadly, Mr. Colmes did not follow up on that revealing statement and pull on the thread a bit. Is Dr. Stein suggesting that because polls and pundits had predicted that Secretary Clinton would win those three states something suspicious must be going on? Is she suggesting that a telephone poll conducted by a media outlet should be considered more predictive of an outcome than the actual, physical votes and the final tally?

If late polls had predicted a slim win by Trump in these states, would Stein still be asking for this useless recount?

She and Team Hillary have been sanctimoniously claiming that they just want “every vote counted,” but it seems pretty clear that the only votes they want counted are the ones they weren’t expecting to not vote for Hillary.